Island Beach State Park to Barnegat Inlet Bird Hike

This piece I had published in The Sandpaper, offices in Surf City, New Jersey, in 2010.

Just returned from England, I haven't fished in almost two weeks. Of course I knew about England's chalk streams, but didn't know how common the small trout streams. Next visit, I want to bring a fly rod.

Bird Hike to Barnegat Inlet

by Bruce Litton

          Twice, in 2007 and 2009, my son Matt and I anticipated the onset of the deep fall season by an Island Beach bird hike with New Jersey Audubon members. Most years, November’s first week marks the moment when across the state the leaves are down. In recent years, at least one exceptional fall flourished much later than usual. But on the first November Friday of 2009, a powerful westerly wind ripped away what straggling, brown foliage was left; and the death-hollowed, beige ghosts of phragmites that had grown tall on Barnegat Bay shores bended nearly horizontal. Cold slipped across the state from somewhere in the upper Midwest, but being no more than a bracing nip, a heavy jacket and cap sufficed for comfort. Two years before, on the first November Friday of 2007, chill seemed to hurry migrant birds southward as well, although I remember no such wind.

          That first year I knew something about what birds for us to expect. I had lived through Long Beach Island winters for about 13 years of my youth, working the bay as a clam treader year ‘round, taking mental note of birds on the bay and on beach walks. Birding had remained in my blood since I was 11-years-old; my species list tallied 169 different kinds at the end of 1971. It seems as if my passion for bird watching would have continued to grow into a lifelong commitment. Having studied books on birds intensely and spent many hours daily and weekly in woods and a marsh near my home, I also drew and painted birds. But bird watching was a social dead end for me, as virtually anyone would expect for a boy in America during the early 1970's, the endeavor having been an entirely solitary pursuit. It took real independence to do it persistently. But after a year or so, I guess the precedent of fishing with friends took its own place in the scheme of my interests, replacing birding, as much as I fished alone anyway. 

          On that much more recent day with New Jersey Audubon the birders were a flock among themselves, something that I never knew as a boy.

          My son, then eight, and I met the group of perhaps eight or nine other people in a lot near the Island Beach State Park entrance. It was not to be our first birding in a group, although we had perhaps only two or three other such trips behind us. I felt slightly distracted birding in the group, but I was sure that this feeling ultimately had no necessity, that it was just my inclination to be alone getting in the way, memories from many years before. Besides, advantages such as more eyes to sight what one pair of eyes might miss, a collective pool of bird knowledge, conversations, and even shared superior equipment (high magnification scopes), clearly added to excitement and interest.

          First we began a walk from a nature center along a well used trail to edges of Barnegat Bay. We repeated the same paths two years later with new people led by the same naturalist.

          Mostly migrant birds would focus our interest. The Atlantic Flyway is the migration route for birds from north to south, and back again. It generally follows the North American Atlantic coast, although its width extends from offshore pelagic status to as far west as the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and northeastern Ohio. Our trip had been planned to allow for sightings of birds yet passing through, here to stay for the winter, as well as for sightings of fewer resident birds.

          Familiar brant first caught my eye. Perhaps a dozen bobbed about a hundred yards out from baywater’s edge. These goose-like birds—very easily confused with Canada geese—are smaller, although larger than ducks. Brant have some white markings on the neck below the head, while Canada geese have a striking white sling from under the throat to behind both eyes which appears almost triangular from a side, and brant are black to the bottom of the breast. Other differences mark less saliently. I told my son that many of these arctic breeders had accompanied me and my fellow treaders clamming among eelgrass in cold water. As our feet had churned through bay bottom mud and roots, eelgrass released and floated to the surface where brant eagerly ate these greens just out of our reach.

          With my ten-power binoculars, I focused on a distant patch of birds in the chop, which someone had already identified as bufflehead ducks. A loose group of about five ducked and rose with the waves. This specie, too, was very familiar, I told my son. I had seen thousands and they never failed to thrill me by the boldness of the large white patch on the head and white lower body and breast, set against a black back and black head. When these ducks fly together, the white on the wings seems almost like a series of strobe lights because of the rapidity of wing beats by which the white portion of wings flash against darker environmental backgrounds and the black of the birds’ own feathers. These arctic buffleheads have always seemed to me to bring a presence of the very far North to New Jersey like no other. Their pristine white patterns seem to strike the air cold.

          When only four of us walked in 2009 to the same viewing points from the bay shore, and a few more spots from a longer walk along marshland, we saw brant and buffleheads, but also closely observed a group of perhaps a dozen mallards feeding in a cove, as well as watched and photographed an American egret feeding on small fish, perhaps killies. I have fished a lot since the age of eight, and have seen dozens of American egrets. But this single bird, unperturbed at our presence perhaps half a football field away, must have drawn from me my best attention ever given to its kind. I saw it eat about half a dozen fish. Perhaps we also saw double-crested cormorants flying over the bay; at any rate, these fish eaters are common here in the summer, and some winter over.

          The bay was a treat; but the main leg of both of our trips involved a three mile beach hike to Barnegat Inlet and back, taking our time to view birds by naked eye, binoculars, and the monocular scope owned by Michael, the naturalist. The first year, the sky beyond the breakers seemed filled with southward-flying gannets, some of them diving from fifty feet straight down for fish. Ring-billed gulls patrolled the beach both years; and we even saw a laughing gull, straggling well behind on its migration to Virginia and perhaps further south to the Caribbean. Sanderlings hustled at the tide line as they do all year.

          We saw a few red-throated loons in their winter phase of plumage swimming well beyond the breakers and disappearing behind swells, then highlighted in full view on the top of a riser. Closely, we contemplated these great birds through the monocular scope. Viewing birds through the scope is like watching an intensely realistic, yet visionary, movie because it brings the birds into exceptional view, and you know at the same time that what you see is actually there before you. The image is relished as it excites the sense. 

          Occasionally, we walked very long lengths between stops for birds. On one of these trudges the first year, Mike mentioned that the ultimate goal of these November Island Beach bird hikes is to see a snowy owl. We never saw one. But rumor had it that a snowy had been seen across the inlet near Barnegat Light. What did raise the pitch of excitement were snow buntings, a whole flock of dozens which together alighted here and there up near the dunes, as well as close to the waterline. These white, finch-like birds spend summers on arctic tundra in limited numbers. Very uncommon, they winter on beaches, which resemble tundra wastes.

          Shortly after we had first sighted buntings, Barnegat Lighthouse began to come into majestic view over dunes. The rocks of the inlet jetty, close enough to make out individually, set a goal that began to seem as tangible as the length of our walk. All along the way on these hikes, I had asked fishermen sitting on the tailgates of their SUVs, or standing patiently beside long surf rods secured in sand spikes, about the fishing. When we got to the jetty the second year I didn’t have to ask. Just then a pod of smaller-size striped bass cornered baitfish in the right angled pocket between beach and rocks. It was fun to see, but more compelling, a sandpiper I had never seen before caught Michael’s attention on the inlet side of the rocks. I apparently had missed the purple sandpiper in all of those study sessions with bird books at the age of ten, had never heard of it. An uncommon bird, the purple sandpiper eats periwinkles and snails, depending for life on rocky coasts and outcroppings or jetties. Having flown from arctic or subarctic Canada, this bird now fearlessly held its ground yards from us at the Jersey Shore. When I was a boy, it used to be that a visit to the beach after Labor Day wasn’t real. Now—no doubt, it's substantial any day or month. I had walked snow covered beaches during my clamming years, caught late fall stripers in the surf, and now had seen snow buntings scatter like snow flakes.

          Michael spotted a large bird on a distant channel marker beyond the mouth of the inlet. Like a sentinel standing atop a watch tower, the great cormorant looked north through the depth of ocean environment, unknown to us quite how the bird perceived that view. Michael braced the monocular on a flat basalt top, and then I viewed another bird I had never seen. New Jersey is the southernmost reach of great cormorants’ wintering range. Double-crested cormorants had passed before my eyes by the many thousands, but the enlarged singularity of this great cormorant, with striking white on its throat, and white patches on its wings, filled me with awe which I have not begun to forget in five years’ time. Besides the purple sandpiper and laughing gull, the great cormorant was the one specie of which we had spotted only one representative. And this very large solitary bird looked to me like no representative at all. It seemed to stand high over the ocean and judge the world for itself alone in striking counter distinction to so many common double crested cormorants I had seen over the years, and yet I knew the bird lived quite beyond that human arrogance.

                

              

           

Try the Delaware and Raritan Canal for Pickerel, Largemouth Bass, Muskies, Walleye, Smallmouth Bass, Channel Catfish, and Giant Grass Carp

This piece is fitting for November, on through winter, into the warm water season, and once again in November, because fishing the Delaware and Raritan Canal is a yearly circle. For nearly 40 years, I've most enjoyed it during the months of October, November, and on through January. It's a very special place for me because my father is an acute amateur historian--being an Episcopal church musician necessitates this, epi-scopal meaning overseeing scope--and his introducing me to the canal at age 10 made history concrete like nothing else had for me. From 1830, when the canal's construction by individual man and shovel was completed, the coal industry was served by manned mule barges. The canal nowadays has many fish species, including gigantic grass carp as large as 55 pounds or more, as well as channel catfish, the more common gamefish, and rare muskies, walleye, and smallmouth bass. I once heard report of an 11-pound northern pike that someone probably caught in the Raritan or the Millstone River and released in the canal.  All of these species and some more are to admire and pursue. Fish have scales you can almost see a human reflection upon. After all, we evolved from fish. They are the central symbol of all that is fishy within us. But what makes this place--all 66 miles of it--particularly special for me is the history, an interest for as long as I can remember. My brother-in-law Iain does hands-on historical preservation work, is presently busy trying to defeat architect Hillyer in Princeton for George Washington's sake, and if it's inevitable that the Princeton Battlefield looses, his fight is worth the gain in the loss, absolutely. All of this goes on record and good men will judge. I best admire hands-on work, like his, above financial boards and other organizations that involve committees, which tend to lose touch with reality for abstractions that are groundless. However necessary boards and the like are, in fact, the little that they may be effective tends to be lost to the sorts of complications I have written about in previous posts. Without finances, what can be done? But without the creativity that makes money possible, everything civilized collapses anyhow. I am a grass roots intellectual who does not know much about institutions that move money about; I certainly know enough to work within them, but what I know most of all is that the greatest intellectual ability of any kind has close connections to the source of reality--nature. I honor both George Bernard Shaw and the rock band named after William H. Davies' Supertramp, Shaw having written the book's preface, because an angler always finds a way, at least so long as I'm concerned. If one has to abandon all and go live off the countryside, isn't that better than sleeping over the grating of a Manhattan sidewalk? 

I desired to go out in the hurricane and fish largemouth bass at sundown Monday. Actually, I had the situation in mind for several days or more. As soon as I got the forecast I was ready for it, and my son, Matt, mentioned the same independently as a good possibility, but I felt so involved with writing since getting off my job early at 11:30 a.m. Monday that walking our black Labrador in heavy winds, awesome ghosts of rain traveling horizontally over the local pond we walked beside, a large branch deposited on the bank, served as sufficient experience of Sandy--the name of the dog a former girlfriend rescued from a shelter and gave to my parents in 1985. How's that for concrete? As if a Powerful Puppy Hound came down from the clouds. Abstraction is no enemy--so long as it's grounded. Abstraction is what makes us human rather than a dog like Sadie, the Labrador, or Sandy, the terrier. But that's really the only way abstraction proves effective, by making it concrete, so that life on earth is lived rather than people wasting their lives waiting on heaven. Psychiatrists have two names for ineffective or pathological abstraction: schizoid personality is the mild disorder; schizophrenia is the severe. You have no choice about possessing abstraction. If you can read and speak, you're abstract. Perhaps if Albert Einstein got out a lot more than he did--although he used to walk along Stony Brook in Princeton on occasion, parting brambles, deeply inspired--and actually lived in the unified field by frequent enough visitation, he might have solved the theory. Just playing with the idea, but a shopped photo does exist in which Einstein drives an Indy 500 car. That, I think, is the sort of field experience he would have needed--more than pedestrian speed.

But here's the situation I met perfectly, although without a rod and reel, and I admit I felt twinges of guilt for not fishing. Up above this pond we fish is another; a six-foot diameter pipe runs underground, under a roadway, and under large parking lots connecting the two. Essentially, a stream from a spring out of Schley Mountain, the mountain the very northernmost beginning of Watchung Ridge, which some 300 million years ago was a series of major volcanos, the stream connecting the mountain, the ponds, and North Branch Raritan River. Some of the largemouth bass in the North Branch Raritan and Raritan rivers have their origin in the ponds of our neighborhood. These mountains o 300-foot vertical elevation were once enormous, not as large as the Himalayas--as were the Appalachians--but much more than the worn down remnants, just as the American nation was greater in the 19th century; playful comparison that this is, we've been wearing down ever since, going more and more insane, which is why I prefer to be by myself much of the time. (As you might infer, I'm wildly extraverted.) My son finds pumice at the North Branch Raritan River. The mountain looms brightly over Bedminster and over the North Branch serving as the excellent river running through town, clean like champagne and inviting anyone for a summer swim; my son and I explore underwater nooks and crannies by snorkeling. Situations discovered can tell you all sorts of unexpected things. The Wood Duck Pond above the local pond we fish has been off limits to anyone but an occasional maintenance crew and whatever overseers, has for many years before my family moved to Bedminster, and is absolutely packed with largemouth bass. When we moved here in 1999, I just had to leap the fence once like a kid, take one cast, hook a bass and see the others trying to snatch the topwater plug from the hooked fish. That was all! One cast, and I got out of there fast because I was visible from the road; all I needed was to be arrested upon beginning here. (I can say so on the world wide web because you can't really know if I'm telling a tale or not.) So springtime bass spawn and some of the tiny hatchlings take a tunnel journey to the pond below. The pond is loaded. And certain rainy conditions also mean a load of water entering at that pipe. Bass move in to take whatever forage comes through--essentially they are attracted to the mud-thickened, fast water--and all I have to do is toss a spinnerbait and unless it's winter, it's bass every time, gingerly released. Bass sort of smell like ginger. If you ever try a bass on the dinner table, add Old Bay seasoning and it will very vaguely taste like ginger, although this can almost mean anything, but not quite. Walking Sadie, I viewed the water coming through that pipe at near perfect volume for action.

Well, at least I predicted it days ago and just walked out at sundown with my dog, having forgotten that I might go witness the storm. 

Try the Delaware and Raritan Canal for Pickerel, Largemouth bass, Muskies, Walleyes and Smallmouth Bass

By Bruce Litton

(Written for my Recorder Newspapers "Reel Time" column and updated for the Hurricane.)

          Having fished the Delaware and Raritan Canal in New Jersey since 1970 I hold a special affinity for this hand-dug waterway. Construction began in 1830, the same year Woolrich came into existence, maker of fine outdoor shirts appropriate for fishing this time of year, the best time to fish the canal. Mule-drawn coal barges on the canal had little to do with shirts or sheep, but the men leading these hauls got plenty of exposure to wind, chill, rain, and snow. Since they made their way from as far north as Bull's Island near Raven Rock to New Brunswick outside, some may have worn Woolrich in the spring and fall.

          Today the barge tow-path still exists, but between it and the water, trees and underbrush grow densely enough to provide excellent fish habitat. Between thickets space opens irregularly every ten yards or so where an angler can stand on the bank at the edge of water and cast. Depths of eight feet move at a very slow pace, most of this water irrelevant to finding largemouth bass and pickerel. Always fish for them near submerged brush, wood falls, aquatic vegetation, and shade, only a very few of these structures are out in the middle, and the best are combinations of wood and vegetation.

          Before the canal was drained and dredged during the 1980s, sand bars existed at Quaker Bridge Road in Mercer County. Every fall, shoals of shiners huddled in the shallows of these sand piles. Pickerel stalked them. On occasion a pickerel would rush up on top of a sand bar and take a shiner. It must have taken many years for such fish habitat to form, and I’ve never seen a sand bar in the canal since. These sand bars constituted the very best October structure for pickerel and largemouth bass.

          But another unusual structure will exist for as long as does the canal. Widely interspersed throughout its 66 mile length, locks regulate flow. Fast water below these locks attracts rare walleyes and smallmouth bass. I’ve never caught either in the canal, but I am witness to both. Since the canal flows out of the Delaware River, walleyes, smallmouth bass, muskies, and channel catfish make their way into it and have been caught all the way down to New Brunswick. The New Jersey Department of Fish & Wildlife took the clue from reports of muskies in the canal, and now stocks it with six to 12-inch muskies, 150 of them this year.

          While this is not a profusion of fish, muskellunge are solitary, uncommon, and large. Among most freshwater anglers they are understood to be the pinnacle prize--beyond Atlantic salmon--because of this mysterious and enormously powerful solitude they possess. Compared to other freshwater fish, each muskellunge is in a class by itself. I have great admiration for Atlantic salmon, and my son saw a live specimen in the Salmon River this past summer, but they lack the ghostly solitude of muskellunge, the paradox of muskellunge with their ability to vanish and be unseen, yet dominate singularly more area of a lake, river, or canal by their visceral presence than any other fish by a very long shot. Perhaps a single muskellunge will dominate an acre of Lake Hopatcong, for example, far and away with more power than any hybrid striper, channel catfish, or bass. And walleye in their lake bottom, stone palaces reminiscent of Aristotle's architectural glory in the darkness of hell, as accounted for by poet Dante--these couriers of messages too dark to be shadows, walleye have little status to compare with muskellunge. Though we hold them in great esteem, walleye. Not in Hopatcong, but maybe in Monksville and Cansitear they do indeed have such rocks. Without the fish, the Philosopher could not do business. But the philosopher's greatest courage is the secret of Elektra and the Greeks are not forgotten here below: The musky rides on lightning under its belly. Atlantic salmon, compared to muskellunge, are bound to fellow feeling, although they are more independent than other salmon species, and this, I believe, is their special allure. The New Jersey state record 42-pound, 13-ounce muskellunge came from Monksville Reservoir. As unlikely--I think absolutely impossible--as the canal is to host a musky close to this size, 15 or 20 pounds is certainly not out of the question. Fifty-five-pound grass carp have been caught, so it’s clear that the canal produces very big fish. But leave it to a monastery to produce a giant muskellunge. A certain slant of light so transforms Hopatcong, even though honey can seem out of place. Monksville certainly cannot be far behind the Philosopher's shoes. It's all in the words.

          In 1977, I experienced a musky of about seven or eight pounds attack my large Redfin floater/diver plug at the mouth of Lockatong Creek where it enters the canal in Hunterdon County. I knew this was a likely spot and used a much larger lure than I usually do for pickerel and bass. It was also the right time of year—October. The fall produces a forage shift from summer morsels of many kinds to fish forage, especially fish with soft-rayed fins, that affects all gamefish species, and besides, muskies are most active in cooler temperatures. Most streams flow underneath culverts that support the integrity of the canal’s steady flow. The Lockatong Creek near Raven Rock is the most interesting exception.

          From the mid-state Highlands and Piedmont region, the canal is easiest accessed in Somerset County, near Manville and Millstone, far from the Lockatong and Hunterdon County. Solitude is abundant, interrupted on occasion by a biker or tow path walker who usually is friendly. I find it much more interesting and enjoyable to achieve a comfortable pace moving from one clearing along the bank to the next, rather than staying in one place. I've always roamed and will never change. If I'm not walking in my 90's, what's the use? Better to live beyond age 61 but vitally and with encompassing range. No insult to Stephen Hawking; he remains productive long after his estimated time of death. Even ice fishing--which often involves some sitting--I best enjoy while walking on bare ice. To walk on ice is elevating. I feel the lift. It is water, in fact. I like it best when I'm successful at the fishing, running after tripped flags, but walking on ice transcends success or failure. No doubt, more fish will be caught in the canal this way, too, by covering range, walking, although I believe I never have ice fished it, but considered doing so in the winter of 1977/78.. The object is to locate fish with your lure or bait, not sit in place and wait for a fish to come along as if you are dependent on what they do, instead of defiant of everything but what you choose to do.

          The canal is stubborn to yield in the winter. But don’t give up—keep placing a small, weedless jig, or live shiner on a size six, plain shank hook near submerged brush and aquatic vegetation, keeping retrieves fairly slow, and you will be surprised. Pickerel often race out of cover and strike magnificently in clear view. Most fish are fairly small, but four pounds is possible.

          Don’t forget that pickerel have razor-sharp teeth. I recommend 15-pound test fluorocarbon leader tied to a small barrel swivel. This little piece of metallic technology is the link between you and a fish on a lighter line you can cast effectively. The main line can be 15-pound test Power Pro braid—the diameter is about as thin as six pound test monofilament--but braid is more visible to fish than fluorocarbon and vulnerable to pickerel or musky teeth anyhow. I’ve never had a problem moving a fish from cover using six pound test, but heavier braid is good insurance. You never know if a tiger muskellunge will boldly attack when least expected. 

My New Website 

Rainbow Trout Round Valley Reservoir at the Surface

Each time I reeled the m & m (marshmallow and mealworm) rig in, the two marshmallows tore off the hook and floated to the calm surface, and trout took them within seconds. If flycasters could get the needed range, I think they would have caught rainbows left and right, possibly some browns by now too. As for everyone else with shiners under bobbers and m & m's floated off bottom, I heard of one trout caught.

We saw more than a dozen leap in an hour's time. And more that tailed at the surface over 10 or 15 feet of water like permit or bonefish on shallow flats. I've never seen this happen before. I've seen plenty cruise in very shallow water, but not oriented to the surface over the depths. 

Enlightenment for the Sake of my Novels: Eternal History and Being Down to Earth

Put out a line at Round Valley Reservoir. In an hour's time I saw one rainbow almost caught. A couple of them cruised by in water almost too shallow to cover their backs.

Thought I might have to take a long hiatus from my work on the novel, but I came right back around after spending time in the 5th dimension or whatever you want to call it. About two months ago I told my brother Rick that I would be toast if I didn't fish. I really need to get my feet wet and I never complain that my boots stink. They seem clean as a whistle.

Some achieve enlightenment for enlightenment's sake, but hiking boots represent what is more important to me. Life on earth. I think of the entire event of the last week or so as having informed my novel; that's what it was all about. I intend to finish it and continue on with other works I have in mind. There was a lot more to the experience than I may put into words, but the point is that I do have a purpose as an artist rather than being someone divested of endeavor for the sake of God.  

Drama of the Orange Monk: Temptation, Resistance, and Release

 Haven't fished since the 13th, with Landolfi. Thought I would put in a playful post that might make sense as a little game. No big deal, just a little fun.

Our featured animal in the photos is an oyster cracker, also known as an orange monk, related to monkfish prized for the table. Supposing that a monk represents certain possibilities, rather than that these ultimately existential realities are limited to monastic life, I have caught on film an analogy to a drama of force and temptation.

But look how our little fish came out of being surrounded in the attempt to get the hook out. I snapped a picture of a smiling orange monk just before the line was cut and fish released. 

Round Valley Reservoir and Ancient Greece: Shoreline Rainbow Trout in Abundance

 With the camera I told a Bedminster friend--after my son's recent football game loss--never loses, I shot these photos. Interjection--my natural grammar (lack of it!!!) is ancient Greek. That's how I spoke in my teens. Very often. And it's how I wrote before revision, and grammar is still difficult. Ancient Greek is a straight line.

Surprised by best neighbor friend arriving on the scene. He's the guy in the photo below, blown away by the energy in the air. Steve and I have no plans at all but the agreement that another fortuitous lunch meet at the reservoir would be nice, my getting some more photos than I have today.

The Western Dream is gloriously more than west of the continental divide.

One of the anglers shore fishing rainbows called me over from my perch where I photographed. A whole school of close to a dozen rainbows, the largest about 20 inches, foraged in the broken whitecaps, the sediment roiled by the blow from the south. 70 degrees. Right there. Eight feet from my legs. You can make them out in my last shot.

Why Ayn Rand Despised Ronald Reagan and What Capitalism Really Is

Litton's Line expands upon angling. I didn't anticipate with the first post that the blog would communicate so many ranging ideas, but I am well aware it's still only a blog. I type very little compared to what I pen in notebooks.

I read Atlas Shrugged in Brant Beach, New Jersey, at age 21, and felt very pleased that Ayn Rand: 1. Voiced an appreciation for given nature through her character Rearden. I would expect this. All true creators begin with elemental nature, and as far as I know, all have personally spent time in the wilds to absorb nature. 2. I felt distinctly thrilled that a woman is described fishing in Galt's Gulch.

But I felt much more than thrilled to later read of clammers in The Simplest Thing in the World. A deep level of plot suggests itself. Living in Brant Beach during the summer of 1982 when I read Atlas, I clammed to earn a living, and I held commercial licenses for each of 13 years beginning 1980. Long Beach Island, New Jersey, became my home and yet sort of an outpost from which I would later return to live in mainstream society, my purpose at the shore to study and write. I had come upon some of Rand's works on my mother's bookshelf during that first summer of 1980 doing this self-employed work. I took her novella Anthem back to Beach Haven Crest to read. 

No reading experience before or after has ever enthralled me to such intense degree. When I enrolled at St. John's College, Annapolis, for the spring semester of 1982, one of my fellow "Febbies" (students who enrolled in the spring) made a sarcastic comment about how stupidly simple Anthem is. I find it lean, spare, and direct with an amazing power to elevate, if you are young and know what it's like to be marginal for being intellectually gifted.

Rand herself never liked that description of giftedness. Her whole emphasis is on what we achieve, not on what is given to us, and yet each of us is born with a given potential, and I think it's important to begin with that and honor it as a birthright. 

This primary motivation from native consciousness connects me with the ultimate substance of originality. Postmodernism claims nothing original can be done anymore, but this misses the point. Originality is a matter of beginning anew from fundamental truths, which Rand encourages her readers to grasp. Ultimately, it's not a matter of truths restated in pastiche arrangements, but an act of union with what Rand named the metaphysically given, and fishermen call the great outdoors. 

I wrote a paper at Hampshire College on Ingmar Bergman's character Isak Borg in the film Wild Strawberries, a title which might obliquely recall The Beatles, but for me the theme of Borg's alienation from nature became readily apparent, and though the paper came as a surprise to my instructor, John Roosevelt Boettiger, he lavishly praised it as thorough and insightful. Boettiger happened to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandson, and even though my politics were and are radically pro-capitalist, rather than quite liberal as FDR began the tradition, John and I began a dialogue I wish had gone further. 

More important than capitalism as a system of produce and money, the system of the mind begins at the bottom, not at an indoctrinated top tier cut off from origins. 

I think the question of our times involves whether we will regain original substance, whether we will unify with nature and create culture and civility, or whether we will collapse like a top-heavy skyscraper with no grounding on bedrock.   

Most of the stay I mentioned at the shore, we clammers shelled it out during the Reagan years, and it never surprised me that before her death in 1982, Rand utterly despised him. I don't think this indicates her "alienation from reality," as came out in a published conversation between Nathanial Branden and someone else I don't recall. Reagan was a conservative. Rand clearly not a conservative, but a radical. The fitting definition for radical she offered is common in dictionaries. It means, "to the root," a metaphor for the origins of nutritional substances. And although an actor, Reagan's affinity with art and philosophy is dubious. Even though I came upon a writing sample of Reagan's in Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte that moved me as revealing a poignant gift for experience portrayed in poetic language, why, I ask, is no President like Thomas Jefferson present in today's world, or Abraham Lincoln with his profound literary grasp? And though I read Theodore Roosevelt's The Strenuous Life with trepidation for what I felt to be an inflated assertiveness--after all, that life didn't last long--he was a man of passion, literature, science and the outdoors. 

Rand made it abundantly clear that every human being has affinity for art in order to have any motive and a necessity of philosophy to be able to think and guide any of those motives, and yet many conservatives lack profoundly in the personal qualities of culture that art and philosophy create. I don't mean to blame them, but enjoin them to take part. Remember that art and philosophy serve schooling secondarily. It's not as if an either/or division necessarily exists between great American can-do, on the one hand, and "books" on the other. It's not even necessary to graduate with a four-year degree to become educated. I never did. A bookshelf is needed, but never forget that Galileo implored people to learn from nature, more than he urged them to read. Nevertheless, reading is practical like anything else, and it does wonders for making the will effective at doing anything.  

Consider that personal value is ultimately intellectual and hard won, because without thought and effort, no one can emerge by any name. This is exactly why education should never be made into a game of testing, and shared essay writing, for example. The essence of capitalism is art and philosophy, for without art there is no motivation, thus no incentive--personal, business, or otherwise--since any form of driven achievement is emotional in nature while being rational in essence. Without philosophy there is no reasoning to guide any choice whatsoever.

I cannot hit the mark directly to reveal the reason of Ayn Rand's contempt for Ronald Reagan, but have a look at America today and consider judgment.